Nseries UPnP Capabilities

One aspect of the Nseries WiFi phones I am sure not a lot of us put into play is UPnP. I for one have hardly used this capability on my N95 which actually is very useful. Considering the fact that you can stream all your pictures, music and video to your phone from your PC or any other so device setup, the Home Media application is neat. But what takes the cake is using TV out in tandem with UPnP. Its pretty nifty to stream pictures from a PC in some room to your TV via the phone.

In this post guest author Anuj Singhal talks about how to set it up and utilize the benefit of say a 120GB harddisk on the phone! Note: Although this post is based on the N95 it may be valid for other wifi capable devices also.

I was going through the internet searching for something new to do with my N95 and found something really interesting, you can read about it here. Although the concept of sharing media using WLAN is not new and UPnP has been around for sometime but it was very poorly implemented on the N95 in the earlier firmwares. It seems that in the hype surrounding the inclusion of on demand paging and NGage application in the v20 firmware for N95 we missed a very neat little improvement. Nokia has improved the UPnP interoperability so to say, to understand what it means we must understand that the UPnP defines three types of devices:

UPnP Servers – These store things like music, movies and pictures.UPnP Renderers – These play music or display images/movies.UPnP Control Points – These tell UPnP renderers what to play/display from which uPNP server.

N95 could only act as a UPnP control point with earlier firmwares and used to have a PC software on the CD to be installed on the computer which used to act as a renderer. The N95 could play the media files on the PC after copying them to itself.

Now with v20 N95 has got both server and rendering abilities, that means you can actually stream media files through WLAN from your PC to the N95 and play them on the phone.

I personally use it with my laptop running windows XP and it works just fine. You will need to setup a home network first (or an ad-hoc network if you don’t have a router) The detailed how to on setting up and ad-hoc network can be found here for Windows Xp and here for Vista.

After the adhoc network is up and running, on your N95 go to Menu- Tools – Connectivity- Home media. This should automatically run a wizard on the first run, otherwise go to options and run the wizard. You should be able to setup the WLAN home media network. You can choose to share the media stored on the phone with the home network during the setup.

Now on the PC, run the windows media player (I use WMP 11), go to Tools- Options- Library. You will see an option to configure sharing, click on it and you will be able to see an unknown device, select it and click allow. (You can also configure what all media to share)

Now whenever you need to play media on the phone, goto home media and click browse home, it will show you PC listed there, on selecting it you’ll see your shared media devided into music, video, pictures and playlists.

Now the catch is when you want to play a song or say view a picture, you have to select it and then click options- click play and select on device. then wait till the file loads. It’ll take few moments, be patient and then it will play, you can control it just like the music player.

There is an option to copy your music onto the device too. You can also view the pictures stored on the PC in a similar fashion.

Hey,
the file sharing works like a charm,but its not what i had expected it would be…initially i had planned to stream videos from my laptop to the N95 and via the cable to the TV…it seems that the n95 can only stream files it recognises,like mp3s stream just fine,but it doesnt natively support Divx and other video formats…coreplayer supports all those formats but it cant get in touch with the home network…any help?

Hey,
the file sharing works like a charm,but its not what i had expected it would be…initially i had planned to stream videos from my laptop to the N95 and via the cable to the TV…it seems that the n95 can only stream files it recognises,like mp3s stream just fine,but it doesnt natively support Divx and other video formats…coreplayer supports all those formats but it cant get in touch with the home network…any help?

Hey,
the file sharing works like a charm,but its not what i had expected it would be…initially i had planned to stream videos from my laptop to the N95 and via the cable to the TV…it seems that the n95 can only stream files it recognises,like mp3s stream just fine,but it doesnt natively support Divx and other video formats…coreplayer supports all those formats but it cant get in touch with the home network…any help?

weird i can’t seem to enable sharing…. i try to initialize, and it says turning sharing on… then after a moment it says failed to activate sharing! i can’t seem to connect to the network with the icon “Home media: under the Tools–> Connectivity–> Home media — when i launch it, it just states at the top Not connected running the wizard doesn’t help either …. WMP11 is setup and i can use WiFi to browse the web with my n95(RM160) but i must be missing something else….

weird i can’t seem to enable sharing…. i try to initialize, and it says turning sharing on… then after a moment it says failed to activate sharing! i can’t seem to connect to the network with the icon “Home media: under the Tools–> Connectivity–> Home media — when i launch it, it just states at the top Not connected running the wizard doesn’t help either …. WMP11 is setup and i can use WiFi to browse the web with my n95(RM160) but i must be missing something else….

weird i can’t seem to enable sharing…. i try to initialize, and it says turning sharing on… then after a moment it says failed to activate sharing! i can’t seem to connect to the network with the icon “Home media: under the Tools–> Connectivity–> Home media — when i launch it, it just states at the top Not connected running the wizard doesn’t help either …. WMP11 is setup and i can use WiFi to browse the web with my n95(RM160) but i must be missing something else….

This is great and working even automaticalliy on my N85 – sync whatever new music i put on my laptop when i choose to sync on the phone.

However i still cant do it the other way – putting images and video taking with the phone on my computer. The option is there on the phone, but its not possiple to choose, so maybe i need to accept this on the pc. Have tried allow images and video for the “unknown device” in mediaplayer, but still i only seem to be able to tranfere thing from pc-phone not the other way?? Any ideas?

This is great and working even automaticalliy on my N85 – sync whatever new music i put on my laptop when i choose to sync on the phone.

However i still cant do it the other way – putting images and video taking with the phone on my computer. The option is there on the phone, but its not possiple to choose, so maybe i need to accept this on the pc. Have tried allow images and video for the “unknown device” in mediaplayer, but still i only seem to be able to tranfere thing from pc-phone not the other way?? Any ideas?

This is great and working even automaticalliy on my N85 – sync whatever new music i put on my laptop when i choose to sync on the phone.

However i still cant do it the other way – putting images and video taking with the phone on my computer. The option is there on the phone, but its not possiple to choose, so maybe i need to accept this on the pc. Have tried allow images and video for the “unknown device” in mediaplayer, but still i only seem to be able to tranfere thing from pc-phone not the other way?? Any ideas?

[…]to understand what it means we must understand that the UPnP defines three types of devices: UPnP Servers, UPnP Renderers and UPnP Control Points.[…]

To avoid any misunderstanding, the UPnP defines much more than just these three devices. The presented devices are defined in the UPnP Audio/Video category, but UPnP also defines many other device specifications for e.g. home automation (lightning control, hvac,…), networking, printing, scanning and remote controlling.

[…]to understand what it means we must understand that the UPnP defines three types of devices: UPnP Servers, UPnP Renderers and UPnP Control Points.[…]

To avoid any misunderstanding, the UPnP defines much more than just these three devices. The presented devices are defined in the UPnP Audio/Video category, but UPnP also defines many other device specifications for e.g. home automation (lightning control, hvac,…), networking, printing, scanning and remote controlling.

[…]to understand what it means we must understand that the UPnP defines three types of devices: UPnP Servers, UPnP Renderers and UPnP Control Points.[…]

To avoid any misunderstanding, the UPnP defines much more than just these three devices. The presented devices are defined in the UPnP Audio/Video category, but UPnP also defines many other device specifications for e.g. home automation (lightning control, hvac,…), networking, printing, scanning and remote controlling.